Best of TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day Demos

When people hear the world "hack", they think of something negative: a spammer or troll trying to get at your personal information. But a hack, in the context of Hack Day, means to build something interesting in a short amount of time.

When people hear the world "hack", they think of something negative: a spammer or troll trying to get at your personal information. But a hack, in the context of Hack Day, means to build something interesting in a short amount of time.

TechCrunch's first Disrupt conference began with a Hack Day; I've been taking photos all day and night.

Over 60 teams presented today. Here are some interesting hacks that were demoed:

Never Alone Again - A simple service that basically allows you to connect to Facebook, add your cell phone number, and location. You will then see a list of people in the same situation. No one actualy sees your number either.

Future Mario

Greenest Loser - Instead of getting badges for doing dumb things, you can get one for doing something good: helping the environment. You can set goals like 10% energy savings.

Welcome Mat - This is a cool welcome mat that welcomes you when you step on it. It knows your Foursquare checkins, your Twitter tweets, and who you've been hanging out with.

Groop.ly - Real-time communication system that works on any mobile phone. You can create plans and send text messages to your friends. It creates a chat room that you can use on your phone with all of the people involved in the event.

Twitter Demographics - This hack for TechCrunch Disrupt searches through Twitter for keywords and determines the location of the authors. The users' locations are converted into demographic information based on their lat, lon, zip code and then the aggregate information is returned. The idea behind this hack is to go beyond just location and start to find out who people are rather than just where they are.

Flymodo - Tracks Twitter users and their tweets in real time as they fly. You can checkin to Flymodo using a hashtag. When you click on the flight, it shows all of the tweets for everyone on that particular flights. There is information about the gate, baggage claim, and more. Useful and kinda scary.

Dogshare - This is a Facebook app that lets people walk dogs. If you want a dog, but can't afford one, you can walk someone else's. If you need someone to walk your dog, it's easy to setup this service:

APPSiGOT - Gives you a way to find out which apps your friends have on their iPhones/iPads. It will find your friends though Twitter and Facebook. The app uses Adobe Air to get data from iTunes. It sorts them by which apps are most popular.

Web HD - A different approach to web design. They basically redesigned Twitter and Google.

iPhone from scratch - This guy put together an iPhone in 48 seconds. I am kinda confused how this happened, but apparently TechCrunch has a video of it.

I did snap a picture of all the parts though.

Venuit - A fan-driven marketplace gives power of the fan to persuade events to happen in your area.

Blue Plate - An open API that allows you to direct different feeds into one central repository.

Want To Know - If you want to buy something, you can use your Facebook friends to contribute to this decision. In real time.

Disrupt Me - Mobile browser, location-aware, real world scavenger hunt. In the game, you are a genius hacker whose project was rejected by TechCrunch. Your new plan is to meet all of the conference speakers, and convince them to support you

City Tracks - Local search for people who don't drive. Avoids highways and such.

FRM - A CRM for your friends. You can set future events that remind you to call your friends. These guys are porting their app into an Android app pretty soon.

Real-time check-in analysis. Gets a list of the top places around you, all the users, and feeds their profile photos into the Face.com API. If you want to find a party with ladies or nerds, you can use this app to narrow down your decision.

I had a lot of fun at Hack Day. So many people impressed me with their ideas and innovation. I was surprised how quickly teams were created and how well they worked together. I am even more excited about the rest of the conference. I will be covering it right here on this blog, so stay tuned next week!

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